An Album of Early Folk Rags

(Stomp Off Records, York, PA, 1982 - LP)

Status: Out of Print

Introduction

Of all the piano rag types now recognized, the folk or country rag lends itself the least readily to definition. Unlike classic ragtime, which was dominated by a prolific composer (Joplin) and a single-minded publisher (Stark) whose standards largely defined the genre, folk ragtime developed under no such guidance. Much of it seems to have been composed by people working in isolation or in contact with a few local ragtimers. While many of these rags were issued by major companies, others were preserved thanks only to small-town publishers; and while some of the latter sold well, it is apparent that a number of these were issued at their composers' expense with little hope of financial reward. Thus a figure like C. L. Woolsey may have had no qualms about publishing a rag as idiosyncratic as Mashed Potatoes or one as physically demanding as Medic Rag. It seems to be the variability of such material that has encouraged so much confusion over the term "folk ragtime," causing at least one observer to question its usefulness. May the following guideline remedy this to some degree and serve those who seek to formulate their own definitions:

Folk Rag: A ragtime composition of predominantly rural musical origin, frequently containing features that deviate from the European rules generally adhered to in classic ragtime.

But one question presents itself and, I expect will persist regardless of efforts to answer it: how can "rural musical origin" be precisely determined? It probably can't. In the case of early folk rags, we are too removed from the origins to sort out the components with absolute confidence, and in dealing with contemporary folk rags, the best of which reflect more recent folk/popular sources, one might question whether much material should be characterized as rurally derived or merely influenced by material bearing some nebulous rural connotation. And could the latter warrant the publication of the term "folk rag"? It is doubtful that most meticulous motivic, rhythmic and harmonic breakdown would yield certainty of the folk type's identity for everyone, let alone a definition with which all would agree.

Folk ragtime has always been less trendy than other ragtimes. A high percentage of the folk rags published after 1905 and even during the teens scarcely reflect the development of popular music after the advent of published ragtime. This is not to suggest that the folk rag is a closed form – it provided and continues to provide some of ragtime's most inventive and flexible outlets – but rather that it flourished in the framework of its own tradition, which was not so susceptible to the assimilation of changing characteristics of the mainstream. This independence is inherent in the folk rag's nature.

The most obvious element of the folk rag's homespun distinctiveness is its predilection for the unconventional. "Improper" part writing procedures, parallel octaves and fifths, unpredictable key changes and strains comprised of odd-numbered totals of measures (instead of the usual 8, 16 or 32) are frequent in folk rags. Whereas classic ragtime evinces respect for the basic rules of part writing (even in the case of James Scott, who occasionally strayed), there is often no such concern in the works of folk composers. Undoubtedly, unawareness of these rules was responsible for many instances of unusual writing. But this removal from classical expectations is not necessarily a handicap, as the open-minded listener discovers; some of the most beautifully conceived writing in ragtime is found is such "ingenuous" pieces, compositions which someone working under the control of European-derived taste would not likely have written.

Folk rags are capable of dispelling as forcefully as classic rags the provincial notion that ragtime's mood palette is limited. The best of these pieces are intense and demanding listening experiences, forcefully engaging in their expressions of pensivity, wistfulness, carefreeness, irony, jubilation and anguish. They comprise a body of music no "lighter" than the Chopin Mazurkas.

All of the rags presented here are obscure and underplayed by the standards of familiarity now accorded classic ragtime. While some of them are internationally available in reprint, Teddy in the Jungle, Texas Rag and Mizzoura Mag's Chromatic Rag are about as unknown as works can be without being lost. But folk rags are now performed with greater frequency and by more performers than since the early ragtime days. The prospect of composing in the folk vein is becoming increasingly attractive to young ragtime writers, as evidenced by the music of eighteen year-old John Hancock of St. Louis. At last the quintessential art form of down-home America is being recognized and loved.

Special acknowledgement is due Trebor Jay Tichenor, without whose uniquely distinguished research many folk rags and much information concerning them would be unknown, if not lost.

Track Listing

1. Teddy In The Jungle (by Edward J. Freeberg, 1910; Rinker Music Co., Lafayette, Indiana). Freeberg was a piano tuner and bandleader who published two countrified rags in his home town, The Purdue Spirit (1909) was a humble prelude to one of the most alluring of all folk rags, Teddy in the Jungle (the cover depicts Roosevelt stalking wild game) is a prototype of pure Midwestern folk ragtime with its affectionate lyricism and casual structure. The second strain, a particularly moving sample of folk lyricism, is conveniently notated as a 32-bar strain to be played twice, although it has the effect of a 16-bar structure played four times.
2. Pride Of The Smoky Row (Q Rag) (by J. M. Wilcockson, 1911; J. M. Wilcockson Music Co, Hammond, Indiana). There is a story that the shadowy J. M. Wilcockson spent time in New Orleans and as a result gave his great rag the name used there to denote the line of cheapest cribs in Storyville. The personification of ragtime poignancy, Pride of the Smoky Row is at once fancy and pathetic; its pseudo-gaiety amounts to a glittering tragedy. Hearing it is reminiscent of finding a valentine of an ancestor who died young.
3. Mizzoura Mag's Chromatic Rag (by H. H. Farris). An oddity that has survived only as a piano roll, this piece sports a B section consisting of 14-2/3 bars; that is, 14 bars are in 2/4 and one is 3/8. The effect is so jarring that some listeners assume that the roll is simply flawed, a possibility not to be disregarded.
4. Mashed Potatoes (by Calvin Lee Woolsey, 1911; C. L. Woolsey, Braymer, Missouri). Dr. Lee Woolsey (1884-1946), who spent most of his life in the town of Braymer in northwest Missouri, is still remembered by many residents of Caldwell and Ray counties as a ragtimer as well as the family doctor. A man of varied interests who required little sleep, his free time was devoted to music, building cars and radios, cooking, and making dolls for the babies he delivered. He died of a heart attack in his garage. Mashed Potatoes is his best remembered effort in northwest Missouri and is still played there by a few people who heard him perform it. Woolsey played his rags at slow and moderate tempi. The late Mike Toomay, who learned all the Woolsey publications and knew the doctor well, took Mashed Potatoes very slowly and in a slightly swinging fashion, creating a snappily accented sashaying effect. On my first trip to Braymer, Mike Toomay gave me Woolsey's piano, which had been stored in a shed on the Toomay farm for years.
5. Kalamity Kid (by Ferdinand Alexander Guttenberger, 1909; Ford Guttenberger, Macon, Georgia). J. Russel·Robinson, who knew Guttenberger in Macon is credited with the arrangement of this piece. The A section consists entirely of a circle of fifths, while B and C feature circles of fifths in the cadences. The 12-bar interlude, culminating in an ascending scale of chromatic octaves, is a surprising feature.
6. X. L. Rag (by Lee Edgar Settle 1903; A. W. Perry & Sons Music Co., Sedalia, Missouri). Edgar ''Jelly'' Settle is believed by many people from his hometown of New Franklin, Missouri, to be the author of The Missouri Waltz. There are accounts that he played it regularly in central Missouri before it was issued by Frederic Logan (who obtained the tune from John Valentine Eppel who is supposed to have stolen it from Settle); in that area it was known as Graveyard Waltz. Settle was a big, bald man with powerful hands who began touring in vaudeville at 17. What can be said of his only known rag, that gorgeous haystack-of-a-piece published in Sedalia and dedicated to a country brothel? Let this suffice: it is the ultimate hymn of outstate Missouri.
7. Texas Rag (by Callis Wellborn Jackson, 1905; C.W. Jackson, Dallas, Texas). Callis Wellborn Jackson remains as recondite a figure as there is in published ragtime, but his Texas Rag is the darling of folk rag lovers. With its lovely parallel octaves in the B strain (in which the bass doubles the melody), bi-tonal reference in the D (D flat major and D flat minor simultaneously) and proud, hymn-like C, which returns to conclude the piece, Texas Rag is the most rewarding of all early folk rags.
8. Cole Smoak (by Clarence H. St John, 1906; John Stark & Sons, St. Louis, Missouri). The best of three surviving St. John rags, this one ranks among the best in Stark's catalogue. Start referred to St. John as "the present-day king of ragtime invention." Not surprisingly, Cole Smoak has more in common with classic rags than the other pieces on the LP -- which renders the blue note in the innocent B strain that much more memorable. The last section is, in effect, a chorale; it a model of climactic power in the culmination of an AA BB A CC DD rag.
9. Sweet Pickles (by Theron C. Bennett, first published under the pseudonym "George E. Florence", 1907; Victor Kremer Co., Chicago, Illinois). Theron Bennett (1879-1937) was from Pierce City, Missouri, an Ozark town near the state's southwestern corner. It is now generally agreed that he was the "Barney & Seymore" to whom The St. Louis Tickle was credited. His immense scrapbook is housed in the library at Pierce City. Of the many folk rags published in Chicago, Sweet Pickles is one of the most original and well-made.
10. Back To Life (by Charles Hunter, 1905; Charles K. Harris, New York City, New York). What little is known of the tragic life of the Tennesseean who was early folk ragtime's most gifted exponent is best told in Rags and Ragtime (Jasen & Tichenor, the Seabury Press, 1978). This is his last and strangest publication, consisting of four loosely assembled sections. The most notable feature is the G minor to F major progression in the first strain, reminding one of breakdowns performed by bluegrass bands.
11. Queen Of Love - Two Step (by Charles Hunter, 1901; Henry A. French, Nashville, Tennessee). This is the definitive country march. Quaint, stately and unabashedly melancholy, it is a fitting introduction to Hunter's rural lyricism.
12. Holy Moses (by Cy Seymour, 1906; Arnett-Delonais Co., Chicago, Illinois). No biographical information concerning Cy Seymour is available. The high point of Holy Moses is the fervent C section, recalling old hymns and the roots of country music.
13. Sponge (by Walter C. Simon, 1911; Gruenewald Music Co., New Orleans, Louisiana). Walter Simon is listed in some of the New Orleans directories of the century's first decade as a music teacher, but he was working as a salesman for the Gruenewald Company when Sponge was published. He apparently left New Orleans in the teens. Could he have been the Walter Simon born in Cleveland in 1884 who was an organist, inventor and author of salon pieces? Sponge (the title is a synonym for "pimp") abounds with gaudy eccentricities. Wildly deviant part writing, raw fourths and fifths, and the absence of the second strain's 16th bar on its second and third statements (the latter instance ending the piece) are immediately arresting characteristics. The introduction, A section and variation of A (all in F minor) are as sinister as the rag's title, while the brief C sounds like a sarcastic meditation upon Old Folks at home. But it is the B, with its garish, clanging treble octaves stuffed with fifths and its bass of fourths and fifths that sums up Sponge's ironic personality. When I gave its first recording in 1978, I called it "one of the most compelling adventures in ragtime." I reaffirm that description of this elegantly mysterious and disturbing piece.
    
    David Thomas Roberts, January 13, 1982

Pinelands Memoir

(Euphonic Records, Ventura, CA, 1983 - LP)

Status: Out of Print

Track Listing & Liner Notes

1. Madison Heights Girl (1979). The world of country string band music, particularly as expressed in the breakdown tradition, influenced this piece. Madison Heights is a suburb of Lynchburg, Virginia.
2. Hattiesburg Days (1979). Like Forrest County, Hattiesburg Days is an evocation of my life at the University of Southern Mississippi. The C section is highly representative of my approach to variation in ragtime.
3. Rock Island(1979-80). After a brief stay in Chicago in early November, 1979, I took a bus westward to spend one day in eastern Iowa before heading back down the river. It was through the Quad Cities -- Rock Island, Moline, Bettendorf, and Davenport -- that I rolled out of Illinois and into Iowa. Rock Island is, like Muscatine, a souvenir of that short but ever-memorable highway adventure. Beginning in D flat, it swings to G flat for the final trio and on to C flat for the finale.
4. The Girl on the Other Side (1979). The first strain is my version of the mountain tune "Ragtime Annie." The title is a reference to death.
5. Frederic and the Coast (1979). This habanera is a memento of the great hurricane that attacked coastal Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida on September 12-13, 1979. Returning from Kansas City more than a week after Frederic hit, I witnessed fresh signs of the devastation in Pascagoula and Moss Point. In a few days Frederic and the Coast was underway. For me it is associated with the landscapes of resignation and the tragic peace known to coastlines that have been battered and transformed by their waters.
6. Kreole (1978). Kreole is a village in or near which the bulk of my childhood and adolescence was spent. In Kreole, the same elements found in From Lake Wales to Climax converge and summarize themselves in a frenzied conclusion. Long ago the little town was absorbed by Moss Point, but the Kreole signs on Highway 90 have been allowed to stand.
7. Roberto Clemente (1979) Roberto Clemente (1934-1972), the legendary rightfielder of the Pittsburgh Pirates, died on New Year's Eve off the coast of his native Puerto Rico in a plane carrying supplies to Nicaraguan earthquake victims. Although I was well aware of Clemente during his career it was only after seeing the documentary about him shown during the 1979 World Series that I felt the need to compose a piece related to impressions of him. It was soon written. I have described Roberto Clemente as "a country funeral" and "a folk elegy." Marked "warmly and solemnly" it provides an undiluted sampling of the longing, innocence and anguish I have always associated with ragtime.
8. Muscatine (1979). Named after one of the Iowa Mississippi River towns I touched in November of '79, this five-strained piece was fed by three sources: a night spent walking through town and lodging at the Hotel Muscatine, the flavor of the nearby land, and the constant spirit of the river that witnessed the disappearance of the Indians and the advent of pioneers.
9. For Molly Kaufmann (1981). Named for the Denver-based ragtime musician, this piece can conceivably by viewed as a syncopated nocturne. The first two sections are in E major and C sharp minor respectively; they are followed by a mofulation to D major, the tonality of the trio. This trio, which recalls the Romantic nocturne with its arpeggiated bass, is divided by an unrepeated 20-bar habanera strain in B minor. The trio's second statement is greatly extended, leading climactically to a chromatic modulation which takes us to a transformed restatement of the rag's opening section, this time in A major. This is also extended, not climactically, but toward deep repose. A coda follows, marked calando. For Molly Kaufmann is an unusually complex and ambitious composition by ragtime standards, synthesizing the rigid, rondo-like features of the traditional rag with the developmental structures reminiscent of sonata form.
10. Forrest County (for Maria Ratcliff, 1979). In the notes accompanying the piano roll of this piece which I cut in October, 1979, I wrote of Forrest County: "It was from September 1973 to March 1975 that I attended the University of Southern Mississippi at Hattiesburg, which is the seat of Forrest County. In that period this town and its surrounding land became and in many ways remains the nucleus of my life." Forrest County is an outcry for a setting and period which, in the delicate form in which I so richly knew them, are perhaps irretrievable.
11. Pinelands Memoir (1978). With the exception of For Molly Kaufmann, this is the most ambitious piece included here and is very nearly my most successful ragtime composition. Note that the hymn-like element runs throughout. Unusual features include parallel octaves in the first strain, the placement of a 12-bar structure beside one of 32 bars, the 34-bar trio, a 14-bar interlude based on the second strain, and a coda. I view Pinelands Memoir, which began as an improvisation at the Gazebo in New Orleans, not only as a high-point in my ragtime work but as the musical culmination of my relationship with South Mississippi.

Through the Bottomlands

(Stomp Off Records, York, PA, 1984 - LP)

Status: Out of Print

Introduction

I have little interest in supplying listeners with "purely musical" analyses of my works. Such observations can be made by others, as the "purely musical" is generally evident, or at least potentially evident, to musically educated listener-students. I find it irritating that so many serious composers who write their own liner/program notes devote the space to formal discussions that could have been authored by the common academic. Not only do I feel obligated to here leave alone formal analysis, I believe that to devote more of this space than is essential to the merely objective would be wasteful. I am interested in sharing with you information about this music that could have reached you from no other source.

Since early childhood I have been writing, painting and composing. I remember no early time when my identity was ambiguous, my goals uncertain or my inclinations unrevealed. I did not identify with people around me but with "historical" figures. The assumption that I was akin to the people whose acts were preserved in books and that I too would enter the encyclopedias seems to have always been with me. I felt estranged from children and adults, particularly the former, and remained disappointed in both. The anguish of school life was a force that persists in affecting my associations with all people.

Moss Point is a paper milling town on the Escatawpa River just off the Gulf coastline. There the coastal marshworld meets river swamp to compile a roaring dictionary of greens. Bordering the wetter passages are pockets of the vast pine forests which overspread south Mississippi. To the north, along the Pascagoula River, there is preserved one of the few major river swamps remaining intact in North-America. Southeast of Moss Point, on the fringes of the swampy terrain that melts into bayous and open water, is the village of Kreole, and to the southwest is the old port and ship-building center of Pascagoula. In this collage of vegetation, industry and beach I was born.

One of my most reassuring associations with Moss Point and Kreole is the memory of the late night beeping and clacking of the paper mill as I lay on the verge of sleep. Moss Point... that sad river town with its box cars, shrimp boats, dark greens, half-cleared lots and starvation for intimacy whose somber lyricism goes on quivering in my dreams, on desks, in pianos and windows...

I have always been moved by props, often far more than by the human activities for which they were devised. An assembly of objects without the visibility of their makers or utilizers intimates qualities that will always preoccupy me. The untranslatable body of intrigues voiced by isolated houses, shut-down communities, lost articles, farm or construction equipment unattended, warehouses, railroads, the props of the highway... Such quiet marvels are central to my visual life. And not only are they carriers of the most urgent mysteries, evocations and possibilities; they are vehicles of the deepest, dire longing.

I have sporadically pretended to love objects more than people. There have been many favorites-road signs, gravestones, airships, devices of punishment (1 owned a full-sized, functional guillotine and stocks which I displayed in the yard when I was eleven), wind stockings, and, of course, random combinations. Utilitarian artifacts even more than art objects received attention that, under other circumstances, could have been claimed by humans. Objects in combination with terrain and flora came to uniquely illuminate the identity and need of love, its anticipation and idealization. Through the land-object collaboration I possessed a conduit of love. Through fields, subdivision streets, houses at swamp-side, ballparks and pine stands, my love of women screamed and nourished its irrepressible life.

Much of my ragtime is associated with eroticism. Even in those rags which are not actively informed by erotic memories or imaginings, an eroticized mode is usually in effect. I have always viewed this sexualized cognizance-whether lending itself to characterizations of "innocence" or "experience" -as an essential dimension in ragtime expression. In The Early Life of Larry Hoffer a recognition of the anti-sexual is taken into account; the subversion of the erotic on various levels, the sense of being sexually passed by and denied all semblance of erotic affection, and ultimately a pervasive rage toward sexuality are phenomena marking the biography of Hoffer and my private image of him. One of my most mellifluent rags, Leslie Bovee (1980) is named after a pornographic film star and seeks to register the haunting and tangled plethora of properties experienced in the source. Elsewhere in my ouvre are more celebratory erotic pieces. It is in Waterloo Girls as in perhaps no other composition of mine that the dynamism of desire-with its revelatory hope, anticipation and illumination of freedom, and, also its fears, piquant evocation of the innocence-experience duality and all the peculiar vestiges of repression and deprivation that in the end must serve desire's complication and intensification - is so unabashedly, triumphantly affirmed.

Eclecticism is a feature of all my work. Figures as diverse as Pierre Reverdy, Charles Ives, Paul Klee, Scott Joplin, Andre Bret6n, Hank Williams and Adolph Wölfli have deeply affected my production. Although my most evident need is to write, I can't envision a tenable life without painting and composing. Not only are my mediums mutually informing; they are elements of the same invention.

Why is the composing of ragtime a component in my string of necessities? Because I perceive too much inventiveness, musicality and sheer love in the medium for it to be otherwise. I have written before of the piano rag's attraction for the composer who is excited by the challenges of amalgamation, and particularly for the thinker who thrills to the combination of various "vernacular" and "art" musics. But these interests, which I certainly entertain, provide no basis for my need of ragtime. I need it because of its insistent intimacy, because it affected me in early childhood as did nothing else, because it possesses a very particular poignancy that finds no other outlet. The attitude of ragtime is uniquely Romantic; it embodies a Romanticism without affectation or inflation. It is miniaturized, concentrated, fomenting. Ragtime is a child's Romanticism.

Ragtime can never be aloof or uncaring. It must trust you. Great ragtime compositions communicate an urge to share deeply, to know and to be known. However anguished the expression of a rag it does not culminate in evasiveness or self-protection. No pain-infused rag ever had a prayer of mocking or witticizing its way to safety. Grief is ragtime's negative mode, not cynicism.

How could I not compose rags?

Track Listing

1. The Family Lines System (1980). For a New Orleans concert in May, 1983, I wrote of this piece: "A driving composition influenced by country music (as well as the Latin material whose influence sings through my ragtime world), The Family Lines System is named for the railroad corporation that provides the South with its most familiar box cars, engines and cabooses." That June I learned from a Family Lines employee that the company had now become the Seaboard System. He gave me a brochure featuring the new insignia and an explanation of the new name. So it is that the railway equipment so symbolic of the crescent sweep from Louisiana to the Northeast will eventually disappear.
2. Through The Bottomlands (1980, for Vicki Picou). Bottomlands are defined as low-lying areas near rivers which contain rich alluvial soil. But for me the connotation is far richer than the definition. The word "bottomlands" evokes wetlands as well as rich farmland; it recalls rural isolation, tiny, half-tilled farms bordering swamps, the poverty of families reliant upon sharecropping and meager vegetable outputs, dreams of the land and its human tenants existing inseparably...
3. For Teresa (1974, for Teresa K. Jones). The year-and-a-half spent at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg remains the most cherished period of my life. For Teresa is a preservation of the most wondrous of these days. Unlike my later rags, it is dominated by the spirit of pure classic ragtime, which I played daily at that time. It is one of fifteen pieces I recorded via piano roll in Turlock, California in October, 1979.
4. The South Mississippi Glide (1978). This piece, which I consider to be as successful in its own way as Through the Bottomlands, may be viewed as a study in restrained intensity. Its first strain contains a quote from the hymn. "Just As I Am."
5. Poplarville (1979). What is the town of Poplarville? A shadowed beehive of windows and crossroads clicking helplessly in the pinelands, the seat of endlessly macabre Pearl River County, Mississippi, a cornerstone of imaginary eroticism, a dream-fed complex of hermetic longing. In a domain where towns and country communities are strewn through the woods like lost maps, Poplarville is a spectral hub. To the south and west of it are stationed the centers of many memorable nocturnal adventures-Carriere, McNeil, Pine Grove Road, Crossroads and the terrifying Henleyville. In location and identity Poplarville is the incarnation of the town-and-land mystery so changelessly near the center of my consciousness.
   I fear the composition Poplarville. Its floral fabric is too heavy with perverse inferences and grim potential to touch without a shiver. I must approach it as I might approach a complex being or a community. And if its essence is ultimately private, let it be a privacy inviting the most wide-eyed exploration.
6. Lily Langry Comes To The Midwest (1979). Lily Langtry (born Emilie Charlotte Le Bretón, 1853-1929) was the erotic darling of late Victorian England and most of the Western world. She toured the States in the 80's and 90's and performed in Chicago and St. Louis. One newspaper editor in the city of Tom Turpin (being apparently as provincial then as it is now) was so galled at Lily's open maintenance of a lover in her hotel that he encouraged St. Louisans to boycott her performances.
7. The Early Life Of Larry Hoffer (1977). The remarkable, alienated Mississippi composer, visionary and poet Larry Hoffer was born in Poplarville in 1951. He lived in Mars Hill and Sardis, Mississippi during his earliest years before being brought by his parents to Meridian where he has frequently lived since. Showing great aptitude in the first years of his life, he was discouraged by his mother from studying piano and composing. He did manage to find a modicum of training, however, and eventually arrived at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg where I met him in 1973. His brilliance and relentless devotion to his earliest visions in the face of neglect, isolation and opposition comprise a heroism that should exhilarate every true outsider. We both lived in New Orleans through 1982, and it was from there that I last heard of him in the summer of 1983.
   The Early Life of Larry Hoffer is not only reflective of his childhood; it is associated at least as closely with an adulthood little unlike the adolescence. It is concerned with the nearby world about which he only dreamed as well as with the dark and marvelous Mississippi interior from which he came; the urban frights of New Orleans, the strip joints, tourism and port city toughness of the Mississippi coast, the even more foreign Gulf centers of Mobile and Pensacola-these elements are counted in my link to Larry Hoffer and to all who peopled my own early life.
8. Braymer (1979-1980). In the summer of 1979 I went searching for ragtime composer Calvin Lee Woolsey (1884-1946) around his native Braymer in northwest Missouri. The late Hugh Paul (one of the children on the cover of Woolsey's Mashed Potatoes) was my guide. Lonely and lyrical northwest Missouri fascinated me more than Woolsey with its contorted hills and unchanging farms. Braymer itself, an archaic little town planted in lostness, could not have been more satisfying or compelling. I revisited Braymer in September and interviewed Charlie Reno, a ninety-four year-old retired auctioneer who had known Woolsey since grade school. Near the end of 1979 Charlie was beaten to death on his property by a local farmer who suspected the old man of hording a fortune. By that time the long-ill Mike Toomay, who had given me Woolsey's piano on the first trip, had committed suicide. It was after hearing of this that I began Braymer.
9. Rock Island (1979-1980). This piece, like Muscatine, was written after a trip from Chicago to eastern Iowa in early November, 1979. It was via Rock Island that I crossed the Mississippi River into homey and delectable Iowa. As clearly as in any of my folkier pieces, Rock Island sings with my consciousness of early small town ragtime.
10. Tallahassee (1975). After having to leave Hattiesburg suddenly in March, 1975, I became interested in moving to Florida State University in Tallahassee at the urging of composer James Sutton. We look two trips there that year (and were accompanied by Larry Hoffer on the first of these) to prepare our relocation. Jim made his move in autumn; I didn't arrive until January, 1976.
    Tallahassee was written after the second visit when I viewed Tallahassee as a haven from menace. I began the second section in the lobby of a Pensacola hotel while Jim saw his grandmother upstairs. The third strain is labeled "Trio-Chorale" in the score.
11. Waterloo Girls (1980). Its title referring to a southern Illinois town through which I pass en route to St. Louis from Carbondale, this work is a memento of my travels through countryfied Mid-America. A handful of details have been changed since this recording was made. This variance is made particularly interesting by the appearance of Morton Gunnar Larsen's impassioned, dancing 1983 recording on the Hot Club label, which is in keeping with the piece's later form.
    Although I have betrayed it in many works and lesser actions, I am committed to optimism. I offer Waterloo Girls as a testament to an optimism thriving on anguish and pointing, a little coquettishly, to rapture.

Dedication

This album is for Fred Dale, Steve Shepard, Reese Partridge, Andy Campbell, Larry Hoffer and the others who have so bravely devoured the poetry of the bottom lands with me.

The Amazon Rag

(Stomp Off Records, York, PA, 1985 - LP)

Status: Out of Print

Introduction

One of the most influential figures in my life, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote in the introduction to his collected poems: "For me, poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion." For me, ragtime has been a relentless passion. Though it is only one of my many creative vehicles, it is inseparable from me and so rootedly fixed in my consciousness that I balk at envisioning existing, or ever having existed, without it. So strong is this bond that I have been led to imagine it as a pre-experiential force predating my birth and perhaps even the existence of ragtime.

This album is a diverse collection of compositions from eight decades and is the last of three Stomp Off LPs to be based upon my sessions of June-July, 1981 at York College.

Track Listing

1. The Amazon Rag (Teddy Hahn, 1904). Teddy Hahn (1882-1961) was a violinist from Cincinnati. His The Amazon Rag is an example of the adventuresome ragtime tastes of Cincinnati publisher John Arnold who presented some of the most unusual efforts in the early stages of the medium. It is in the third section of this rag that Hahn's imagination finds the fresh territory that makes this one of the most important statements from the Ohio Valley. The textural variety pervading the piece plus the coda-like extension of the D section are also memorable.
2. One O' Them Things! (James Chapman and Leroy Smith, 1904).The opening section of this plaintive St. Louis anomaly is generally believed to be the earliest published example of twelve-bar blues. (Note the similarity between the writing for right hand here and that of Mamie Desdoume's Blues as recalled by Ferdinand Morton at Morton's Library of Congress sessions.) The second strain is reminiscent of Joplin with its chromatic thirds in bars 1-4, after which it shifts to A minor to sound stark, and repeated fourths and fifths in the right hand. The cadence of this section is singularly poignant. The trio concludes with a stoptime passage, after which a bridge calls back the twelve-bar theme for a wistful conclusion.
3. Little Wabash Special (Tom Shea, 1964). Tom Shea (1931-1982) was one of the few authentic purveyors of folk ragtime in recent years. He developed a deeply personal ragtime language as evidenced in this brilliant country rag.
   I learned Little Wabash Special after hearing Tom perform it in St. Louis in 1979. Subsequently it was picked up by pianists Molly Kaufmann, Virginia Tichenor and the Queen City Jazz Band. Aptly, it became the title cut of Shea's Stomp Off LP appearing in 1982.
4. The Watermelon Trust (Harry C. Thomason, 1906). This lyrical work is spiced throughout with some of early ragtime's most affecting uses of non-chord tones. Its composer, author of the equally beautiful A Black Bawl (which utilizes the sixth and seventh degrees of the scale in the same vein) remains one of ragtime's many mystery figures.
5. The Pen Pals (David Thomas Roberts, 1981). One of my most traditional efforts, this countryfied essay in A flat and D flat was composed after my exposure to a particular girlface in pen pal literature received by my friend William Bailey. The variation ending the piece was played with considerable freedom in the first months of the rag's life but took this fixed form after an effective improvisation I performed at the Norwegian Seamen's Church in New Orleans in 1982.
6. Funny Bones (Calvin Lee Woolsey, 1909). This was the first published rag of rural Missouri's composer and physician, C. L. Woolsey (1884-1946). Born and raised around the northwest Missouri town of Braymer, Woolsey was a quintessential spinner of folk rags, a hero of down-home creativity embodying the aspirations of tunesmiths and tinkerers throughout the Midwest/South. (For more about Woolsey and my research in Braymer, see the notes on An Album of Early Folk Rags and Through the Bottomlands on Stomp Off.)
   Funny Bones begins with a 16-bar introduction in A minor. Windswept, lonely and alarming, it wails from a hillside within view of distant farms before yielding dramatically to the gentle humor of the opening strain. B is a thirty-two bar entity of classic Missouri lyricism, hinting of folksong. The trio is a radiant, beguiling vignette showing us small town ragtime at its highest quality. A whimsical bluenote infects the first statement of this strain as it turns around for the repeat. The finale is a naughty, strutting circle-of-fifths which alone would make Funny Bones worthy of occasional performance.
7. Nickel in the Slot (Zez Confrey, 1923). High prankishness and cleverness at the service of the quasi-sublime mark this typically ingenious artifact by the pioneer of Novelty Piano. It became the first Novelty piece to enter my repertoire after I had heard it played in St. Louis by the late George Hicks.
8. The Candy (Clarence Jones, 1909). My acquaintance with this two-step began in early September, 1979 as I rode the train from St. Louis to Kansas City. Carrying the brand new Ragtime Rediscoveries, Trebor Tichenor's second volume of underexposed early rags, I eagerly scanned unfamiliar scores after dark set in near Sedalia. Of all the bits of material I examined the second strain of The Candy was the most arresting and was responsible for the piece's entry into my repertoire upon my arrival in Kansas City. Though sections A and C are not as memorable as the hearth-stopping B, they do possess humble charms which serve to showcase B's wild color.
9. Barbershop Rag (Brun Campbell, recorded c. 1950). In 1978 I became infatuated with the primitive piano music of Sanford Brunson Campbell (1884-1952), Joplin's white protege of the late 90's who had run away from his home in the Indian Territory to meet the Master of Sedalia. My approach to Campbell's rough-hewn music is designed to capture the idiosyncratic nature of Brun's recordings. The musical irregularities and farmyard evocations of Barbershop Rag moved me from the beginning. Campbell's legacy had a potent effect on Trebor Tichenor and Tom Shea as well, which led George Willick to dub the three of us "Brun's Boys" and to publish an article by that name in the November, 1980 Rag Times.
   Campbell was for many years a barber in Venice, California and came to light there as a pianist in the late 1940's. In early 1985 I played his music at a fashionable Venice restaurant called 72 Market, returning the stomping, lilting world of Brun to the beach town in which it surfaced.
10. Mandy's Broadway Stroll (Thomas E. Broady, 1898). Mandy's Broadway Stroll was the first of many excellent rags to be published in Nashville. The relationship, if any, between Broady and the Nashville-based master of early folk ragtime, Charles Hunter, is unknown. Also published by Broady were A Tennessee Jubilee (1899) and Whittling Remus (1990) after which his name disappears. That he may have been the same Thomas Broady who published a march in Springfield, Illinois in 1896 was expressed by Trebor Tichenor in 1980.
    I have always been frightened of the cover of Mandy's Broadway Stroll. It features a girl with a parasol, apparently a prostitute, staring at the viewer from the street: (The red light blocks of Broadway in Nashville were called "the stroll.") It is her pathetically sinister face, which registers a malevolence that flares independently of the rag's title, that so upsets me. The composition's nature is one of the most representative in the ragtime temperament; that Janusian spirit which brightly strides forth and grieves simultaneously, its body stamping proudly before onlookers as its face unabashedly contorts with tears. I view this spirit as the surest guide to ragtime's essence; it has been with us from Sunflower Slow Drag to The Alaskan Rag to John Hancock's Dixon.
    Any elaboration upon my statement in the notes to the album Through the Bottomlands that "ragtime is a child's romanticism" could gladly begin with Mandy's Broadway Stroll. Crudely arranged, musically naive in the extreme, "folksy" in any sense of the word, it is a paradigm of folk ragtime's awkward procedural virtues as well as definitive expression of extra-musical innocence.
    Mandy's Broadway Stroll -- a mutilated Victorian carousel spattered with stains.
11. Chestnut Street in the 90's (Brun Campbell, recorded in 1948). The best known of Campbell's pastiche-pieces draws heavily from F. X. McFadden's Rags to Burn (1899), which is in itself a medley. The title refers to the heart of the St. Louis red light district in its heyday where Campbell knew such ragtime luminaries as Louis Chauvin and Tom Turpin as well as Joplin.
12. Camille (David Thomas Roberts, 1979, for Morria Ratcliff). In early 1979 I was commissioned by collector John Dawson to write a rag named for his little daughter. He hoped that its pianistic demands would not greatly exceed his capability, but I soon decided that his potential capacity was the only one to be considered. Camille became a challenging work by my standards. With John's permission I dedicated it to Morria Ratcliff, whose sudden break with me after our living together for almost three years precipitated the piece's content.
    Morten Gunnar Larsen's recording of Camille was made in Oslo and released by the Hot Club label on Larsen's outstanding Echo of Spring album in 1983. My recording was made on a snow-settled night in the Colorado village of Niwot at a piano shop which has since been enlarged for concertizing.
    
    David Thomas Roberts, 1985

The Ragtime World Of David Thomas Roberts

(The Bridgefarmer & White Company, Jackson Heights, NY, 1988 - Two Cassettes)

Status: Out of Print

Track listing

1. Mainline of Mid-America (ICG) 1981
2. Camille 1979
3. Waterloo Girls 1980
4. Frederic and the Coast 1979
5. Kreole 1978
6. Mississippi Coast Wedding 1987-88
7. Anna 1978
8. Breckenridge/Fairplay/Como 1982-83
9. For Kansas City 1980
10. Through the Bottomlands 1980
11. Pinelands Memoir 1978
12. Forrest County 1979
13. For Molly Kaufmann 1981
14. Leslie Bovee 1980
15. Honey Island Farm 1975
16. Last Days of the Polo Grounds 1987
17. Roberto Clemente 1979
18. Maria Antonietta Pons 1986-87